The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
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The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
1–10 of 188 posts
Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
#2Amazing write-up! Your efforts are much appreciated. I have an Intel Mac Air with an external monitor and strongly feel that usability items like these are sorely underrated. Kudos for the great work in a seemingly closed ecosystem.
Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
#3Very cool, had no idea this was even possible. Is there anything like this for Linux?
Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
#4The XDR works quite well on the MacBook Air, no journey required. Only annoyance is that it has specific ideas which side is up or down when used vertically, and I always turn it the wrong way, first.
Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
#5Very cool, had no idea this was even possible. Is there anything like this for Linux?
On Linux, there is a very comprehensive CLI utility called ddcutil: https://github.com/rockowitz/ddcutil
The same author also made some kind of UI for it but I haven't used it so I don't know how it looks or performs: https://github.com/rockowitz/ddcui
Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
#6Very cool, had no idea this was even possible. Is there anything like this for Linux?
There is https://www.ddcutil.com/ It has a command line utility and a qt GUI. Unfortunately the GUI is a bit convoluted, because it exposes every option that you can change on the monitor. I once almost bricked my LG monitor, because I accidentally locked the hardware buttons on my monitor, via an undocumented manufacturer specific option.
For gnome there is https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/2645/brightness-contr... This addon adds brightness sliders in the power menu for your external monitors.
Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
#7The XDR works quite well on the MacBook Air, no journey required. Only annoyance is that it has specific ideas which side is up or down when used vertically, and I always turn it the wrong way, first.
Yes, I should have probably written something about that as well.
Apple vendored displays have a proprietary protocol implemented over USB so that macOS can natively change the brightness and volume.
Lunar can take advantage of that as well as you can see here at `Apple DisplayServices`: https://lunar.fyi/faq#ddc
So if you want to Sync the Macbook brightness to the XDR, or sync from one XDR to another, or just get more hotkeys to control presets and contrast, Lunar can still bring something over XDR's features.
Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
#8[deleted]
Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
#9alin23 is the creator of Lunar and the author of this blog post. I'm just a fan of the program.
Re: The journey to controlling external monitors on M1 Macs
#10Amazing write-up! Your efforts are much appreciated. I have an Intel Mac Air with an external monitor and strongly feel that usability items like these are sorely underrated. Kudos for the great work in a seemingly closed ecosystem.
Thanks! Yes, it can be hard to let people know that an app like this actually exists.
Some people don't even feel the need for such a thing and just stare hours at a time into a blinding 100% brightness panel when working at night time.
I think that can cause macular degeneration much faster than just "not filtering blue light", but this is not as talked about so people don't think about its effects that much.